MehMehOhs

It’s been a long time since I have blogged here or posted in the forums, but I have lurked about (sneak attack!)* and kept sorta up on things. I like the community here, even if I am not so much a part of the gaming culture anymore. As usual, this will just be an ‘open brain:dump’ kind of thing, and may not make much sense, but it will help me.

I used to be what most would term a “gamer”. I was up on things, could hold a respectable conversation concerning the industry and upcoming titles, had a sense of what the trends were and where things are going…but somewhere I lost it. My 360 has left me for another gamer, my debit card is free of the monthly MMO subscription or two, and the only ‘controller’ I have touch in the last two months is called a ‘remote’ by it’s proper name.

Every now and then I toss a semi interested glance towards the play station, a marriage that started Christmas of 1995, the second best gift I got that year (for those of you who know me a bit, Hunter was the best gift that year.) There had been crushes and flings prior to that…the first puppy love being when I was quite young with the immature Atari 2600. I cheated on Atari with Coleco, and then left them both when the Nintendo boys moved into my world. But my real passionate relationship started with Playstation.

I loved Playstation, we were two peas in a pod. Things were great, and then got even better with the mid-life crisis makeover into the PS2. Wow…that was the passionate time in our relationship. Talk about an affair. But then things started to change…the games started to be less about the play, and more about the visuals…and I liked it. Maybe that was the problem. I got so I wanted more and more complexity, prettier and prettier things, more complicated things, and I forgot about the things I really liked in a game….PS2 wasn’t enough.

That’s when the MMOs started. I have had a shameless stream of lovers…Faldon, EQ, Ultima Online, City of Heroes, Guild Wars, WoW, LoTRo…flirty little betas with WISH, Lineage, Requiem:Bloody mare, and others whose names and faces I don‘t even remember…and now Conan sure looks sexy and has been leaving tons of messages on my voice mail…but does he have any substance? Do any of them really? They are SO pretty. Visually stimulating, auditorally (hmmmm, is that a word? Is now.) arousing, and not solitary even if my environment happened to be for the moment.

But for all the flair of MMOs I find myself completely bored with them. I can find no real core distinction between any of them. They all dress a little different, wear different cologne, style their hair unlike the others…but when it comes down to it they all have the same lines, and all tell the same jokes, and are out for one thing.

Okay, seriously, I’ve had fun running the analogy, but I really mean it when I say that I can not find any real core distinction in any of the MMOs. They all really are about the mob kill level grind (even the skill based MMOs), a few perfunctory crafting/skill systems, and an afterthought of a quest lines. When it comes down to it, from what I have experienced, it is impossible to get ahead in any significant way in any of them without subscribing at least part of the time to the slaughter rule. It’s not that I mind combat, I even enjoy it, but I don’t like being forced into it.

So I guess I find myself bored and disappointed, and it has bled over into the rest of my gaming life. The 360 got the red ring of death, so that disrupted that, then once fixed, was taken over by someone else. I am going to get a new one in May, but I am not sure how enthusiastic I am going to be in getting back to it.

I want to be enthusiastic again. I SO enjoyed GoW, no matter how much I sucked, when it first came out. (Thank you again to all of you great guys who used to so patiently let me play online with you and never got on me for being the chainsaw whore that I am) And I was really enjoying Mass Effect and Rock Band before the red ring stopped the momentum.

Maybe it’s less about the MMOs sucking, and more about the crushing disappointment I felt at the red ring staring at me from the front of my 360, and its subsequent liberation from my possession upon it’s return.

I don’t know. All I know is that I miss the passion I used to feel as a gamer.

*If you know where this reference came from, congratulations, you are as big of a dork as I am :D